


it is just old light

by delrio



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: ? - Freeform, Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-13
Updated: 2020-05-13
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:02:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24141025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/delrio/pseuds/delrio
Summary: The Spaceship Is A Metaphor
Kudos: 3





	it is just old light

Suspended in Horde Prime's spacecraft, it had only taken an hour or so for the adrenaline piercing through Catra to wear off and for the omnipresent fear to spread over her like a rash. The ship was large, but in the scheme of things was in essence only a small hull of metal; it floated in an imperceptible field of constant, unyielding pressure, which could kill them all if there was the slightest deficiency in engineering. Some part of her was only waiting for red light to spill over her, alarms blaring, and her ears perpetually strained for a rushing of air. A sick dread settled in her.

She didn't have access to Glimmer; for their improvised plan to work – a plan she wasn't even sure Glimmer was on the same page about, as she hadn't had any time to confirm before Prime had whisked her to confinement – they had to keep up airs of entire discord. Not particularly hard, for either of them, and Catra didn't know if she would have wanted to talk to her anyways, but it left Catra with time to herself. And between the uncomfortable reflexive self-reflection that had been twisting in her mind, involuntarily, and the dark, choking space she could feel pressing in on the small island of paradoxically life-bearing metal, she didn’t want it. And from the windows she sat at, she could see the lights of Prime's forces advancing on the planet, the fires of war; she sat still for hours, watching, until the ship changed orientation and she could see it no longer, and she had never felt so weightless – not light, just transparent and untethered. At times, Horde Prime was speaking to her, when her mind was still out in the expanse of space (no longer empty), and forgot that she was obligated to respond, forgot that she was a participant in the conversation and not on the cusp of ghosthood.

* * *

The ship seemed labyrinthine at times, and though nothing about it was organic, there was a life given by the coloured lights, and holograms, and the eerie same-faced clones. Still, Catra could find no sense of place there, and none of it did anything to quell her disorientation.

It wasn't the artificial nature of the place. The metal hallways and her assigned room brought her comfort, and though she lived in constant awareness that Prime could dispose of her at any time it was nothing new, and there was a stability in having an authority lauding over her. She understood how this worked.

Instead, it was her dislocated internal clock in the monotony of space. Day and night had been pulled out from under her and had instead been replaced with neutral, indefinite stretches of time, many of which she spent in solitude. The passing of time was jagged – when it was regular it was excruciatingly dull or excruciatingly turbulent in her head, and the occasional interruption from Prime or hushed communication with Glimmer – though welcome reprieves from the silence – often only threw her internal clock further. The rushes of action served to amplify the silence. And Catra felt the density of the silence, around her, always a stream of it.

Though, afterwards, she'd come out in a foggy weariness, she gravitated to the windows still. As the days passed and things seemed at a momentary lull, she watched the war machines accumulate, listened to the constant of Prime's voice coolly distributing orders to his subordinates. Listened as he ordered the annihilation of Adora and her friends.

Outside, the planet was in a haze of orange, and red. On the occasion when Catra would shift her gaze away from it, she would look deeper into the blue-black around them all. On the sill, alone, and almost lost in who she innately was, she watched the vast amounts of vacillating tiny silver lights, hung there like fruit.

* * *

The feeling was familiar – it struck her in the darkness of an artificial night, a week in.

Here she was, in a precisely-pressurised floating shell, anchored to nothing. Here: living in wait for the smallest gap in defence to be breached by the torrents of fatal air outside. How long had she spent waiting for the cold hands that held her to come to the end of their tolerance and contract – nail after muscle after bone? She had always fundamentally been living on an island where no lapse in vigilance could be afforded. And what, really, was the difference between the isolation she'd planted her feet in, and the noiseless vacuum of space? A void is a void is a void, and has always been a void.

The image of control that Prime projected over the sweeping blackness outside was a falsehood – only something he could cling to for a feeling of safety; one that Catra felt he didn't deserve. But she didn't feel that she deserved it any more than he did, and so she stayed, rigid and shivering. And if there was a comfort in denying herself acclimation, if her constantly flinty fear kept her fraught and twitchy, well. It was just another cross to bear. And it was the most decent way to be. She hated to seem any way other than the smug snarking antagonist she'd worked herself up to be, in front of Glimmer (even if it had most likely waned in the flames of the last battle's fires), but with the clinging lethargy and their wary truce it was hard to avoid, and a small younger part of her felt that it was decent in some way to show Glimmer another, wearier, and more truthful face. Glimmer, for her part, was less unbearably high strung and irritable than the last time they had interacted so closely, and seemed to catch her forlorn looks and vulnerable worry only occasionally.

When had the world been anything less than cold jaws waiting to snap at her face, trailing droplets of oil spill-saliva down at her smouldering feet – when had she lived with any expectation other than an ending if she didn't check over her shoulder one time? Her sure fate if she had strayed too far from the chalk outline she'd been restricted to? With all things considered, the jump from one ugly hunk of metal to another was not such a hurdle. A comfort seeped through her. Space, in the engulfing strangeness of the situation, condensed as a concept in her mind, and on the way to see Horde Prime once, she passed a window, and watched the colours of her reflection dissolve into the stars and space outside. She touched her one black sleeve and could barely see her face mirrored back at her. She'd been dissolved and marked through with white once before. Maybe there was something to it – an unavoidable gravity drawing her to gaping swathes of darkness, and the inevitable loneliness which had always followed her and always would; was there anything to gain by resisting? Each step she took felt heavy, and she felt that she belonged – if not in Prime Prime's ship – to this sea. Horde Prime was surrounded by bodies, but all bodies of himself, and what better demonstration of the expelling of other people in the climb to the top was there? A hollow inside them both matched and matched the hollow outside.

She hadn't anticipated the vast emptiness, though it should have been obvious. Though she could only glance at the reason behind it, as looking at it fully would only twist her with pain, it was obvious to her why she hadn't: sentiment of days and nights spent watching it from the wrenching ugliness of the Fright Zone. With Adora. It was one invariably beautiful thing she'd had growing up -- on it she had projected the views from distant lands, and happy endings, and the hope of youth. It was different now, clearly: the veil was vanished. Still, she didn't know if that meant she knew better now, or if she just was blinded by a sadder kind of sentiment. It stung to be living in the physicality of this daydream of theirs by herself – the anger roiled in at the injustice and her caring about it and the feeling of wrongness, of misalignment, and the fact that she couldn't feel herself here without wandering finally to the fact that Adora was not here.

Yet the acerbic feeling did something to help her reform. There was life here in the trenches, herself among it if barely. And, too, the heavy ache in her gut reformed, and it lived still, and maybe it would forever. But she would see it through - she always did, and though a part of her had been scooped out of herself it wasn't like she had died. Something inside her felt new.

**Author's Note:**

> i dont know what this is i wrote it mostly at 1am on my phone. sorry if its incomprehensible


End file.
